While health experts and local leaders across the country say coronavirus testing will need to ramp up significantly before the country begins moving toward some degree of normal activity, Donald Trump has made plain his desire to see the United States economy opened up by May—perhaps using a phased approach, easing social distancing recommendations in areas that have not yet seen significant outbreak. “We’re just seeing a lot of good signs,” the president said at a recent coronavirus press conference.

So how will Trump, in the absence of adequate testing, determine how to reboot the nation’s dormant economy? According to the Daily Beast, he’ll be relying on data collected by his friend and ally Peter Thiel’s analytics company, which was awarded a Health and Human Services contract recently to play a leading role in the department’s HHS Protect Now platform. It’s not precisely clear what data Palantir is collecting, where it’s coming from, or exactly how it is being used—but, as the Daily Beast’s Erin Banco and Spencer Ackermanreported Tuesday, the information is being used to “determine when and where to reopen the economy.”

“We are using the data aggregated... to paint a picture for the Task Force, and state and local leaders to show the impact of their strategic decisions,” an HHS spokesperson told the publication. “For instance, if there are a number of cases concentrated at a hospital next to an airport and a mass transit stop, we can build a predictive model using a transmission chain to predict how quickly the disease will spread taking into account these factors.”

As the Daily Beast observed, the administration’s alliance with the company founded by Thiel, Trump’s most prominent ally in Silicon Valley, underscores the extent to which the president has leaned on close allies in the private sector in his handling of the coronavirus crisis. In several addresses to the public about the pandemic, he has paraded business leaders he says are aiding his government’s COVID response, and touted the involvement of corporations in his decision-making process to revive the nation’s economy this spring—whether the companies he named knew they were part of his advisory council or not.

The involvement of Palantir is likely to be seen as especially controversial, given the firm’s past work and the billionaire’s ties to Trump. A 2018 Bloomberg Businessweekfeature—“Palantir Knows Everything About You”—described how “an intelligence platform designed for the global War on Terror was weaponized against ordinary Americans at home.” The data firm, which “cut its teeth working for the Pentagon and the CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq,” according to the magazine, was later hired by major banks and police departments. A London-based Palantir employee—who was said to be working independently of the firm—also helped Trump-tied Cambridge Analytica in seeking to harvest a Facebook data from tens of millions of Americans, according to the New York Times.

Palantir has already done work for the Trump administration, providing profiling tools to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of the president’s draconian border crackdown. And then there’s Thiel’s personal links to Trump. An early Facebook investor and board member, Thiel joined Trump and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a private dinner last year at the White House and he reportedly influenced the social media giant’s policy on political ads.

The data firm has been involved in the administration’s efforts to combat the novel coronavirus, aiding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention model outbreaks—but its role in creating HHS Protect Now would seem to drastically elevate its influence. The platform, which has already informed the analysis of Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, is being designed to serve as the “single source for testing data,” according to the Daily Beast. In helping HHS develop the platform, then, Thiel and Palantir may have an outsize role in the White House’s decision-making process regarding the coronavirus crisis, likely compounding concerns privacy experts already had about the work data and surveillance technologies companies, like Palantir, were already doing for the administration’s response. “We understand that given we are in a crisis, that some temporary adjustment of our digital liberties may be necessary,” Adam Schwartz, a senior lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Wall Street Journal last month. “However, it’s really important that those adjustments be temporary.”

He’s always seemed more at home campaigning for president than actually being one. And having been cooped up at the White House, Trump is reportedly itching to travel—even as the coronavirus death toll rises.